The sound of their hoofs was like the pounding of a thousand propellers.  From above looked the moon, round and serene; she had watched the passing of many peoples in the land of the red silence.  The horse seemed to be gaining.  A few more lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one side and let the maddened cattle race to their own destruction.  All he asked of God was to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug the rowel and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did.  On they came; the chorus of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the pound, pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.

Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly.  “God!  What is it?” as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole.  “Up, up, you damned brute!” but the mare’s leg had cracked like a pipe-stem.  In his fury at the beast Simpson began kicking her, then started to run as the cattle swept forward like a black storm-cloud.

The next second the great sea of cattle had broken over horse and rider.  When it had passed there was not enough left of either to warrant burial or to furnish a feast for the buzzards.  A few shreds of clothes, that had once been a man, lay scattered there; a something that had been a horse.

XVII

Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst

The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent with her habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were involved.  Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the experience of moving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the delay, and could only explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett received reports of the dearth of pasturage on the ground that she wished each fresh educational germ to take as deep root as possible before transplantation.  So that when Mrs. Yellett, shortly after Leander Dax’s arrival at camp in the capacity of herder, announced that she and Leander were to make a trip to the dipping-vat that had kept Ben from his classes for the past ten days, and invited the “gov’ment” to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.

The Yelletts’ “bunch” of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and the matriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that number, as she wished always to give the flock her personal supervision.

“’The hen that’s the surest of her chicks is the one that does her own settin’,’” was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellett succinctly summed up the case.

Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to the market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the matriarch had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in Wyoming.  Often she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the wonders of this new world with remarkable aptness, that she had constantly to fight against the inclination to increase her business of sheep-raising, but that as soon as she should begin to hire herders or depend on strangers things would go wrong.  With the assistance of her sons, she therefore managed the entire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on which Leander lent his semi-professional co-operation.